Day 11 – Yokohama

So our day starts off with lunch at a random restaurant, for some reason we decided it would be a good idea to visit one that was downstairs, sorta like a basement. It looked fairly well decorated so it didn’t seem dodgy or anything.

Lunch downstairs

Walking in, the interior was quite nice and we were brought to a little table which was shielded away from everyone else. I treated myself to some udon and sashimi as well as sharing some tempura. It was quite a feast and we didn’t manage to finish off all the food.

mm... lunch

While we waited for Gavin to grab his camera, we walked around Asakusa to explore before heading to the onsen there. The temple below was touted to be the oldest one in Tokyo or something, but we weren’t too sold, many places seem to claim their the oldest or biggest or something.

Old temple

Walking around there was a random arcade with a funky name, caught my eye at first when the doors were overlapping and it looked like it said Entrerer or something. Couple of anime figurines at the front, not sure where they’re from.

Entrererer

While Tang waited for Gavin at the Onsen, we explored a bit as we were looking for a bathroom, ended up buying some little cakes. While Asakusa is quite further out from central Tokyo, it’s still quite busy and still has lots of tall buildings.

CBD around Asakasa

Other peculiar sight was a tiny statue perched up high of a little man behind a microphone. It was rather cute looking but no idea what the significance is either. Maybe some kinda celebrity figure?

Random little statue

After a while of waiting around for Gavin for a while and he never seemed to show up. Not sure how we missed him but we didn’t end up going into the onsen as it was rather crap, more just like a public bath and indoors. Not ideal. We walked back to the hostel, hoping he’d be there and saw some Rikasha’s around, this one in particular was being pulled by a woman! So beastly.

Beasty Rikisha woman

It was already late in the afternoon when we headed back and time was running out, we decided to push on and head out to Yokohama as planned.

Sun beginning to disappear

While waiting for our train and having trouble because there were a few trains on that line, we saw one of these futuristic looking trains. It was an express train to the airport and it’s styling is something you’d associate with Japan and it’s technological nature. Shame the rest of their trains don’t look like this.

Futuristic looking train

After about an hour we ended up at Yokohama and there’s something very quirky about Japanese ads, we just never seem to be able to work out what they mean, what could covering your eyes with a half cut kiwi fruit and the words we sync possibly advertise?

Kiwi eyes

Continuing on, there was something which we could understand but still don’t really get the relevance of Domokoun being on the poster, kinda cool to see it’s quite big over in Japan, and not just an internet meme kinda thing.

Domokoun yokohama?

The train station for Yokahama sits directly under a shopping mall and after passing through, we finally got to the outside and it’s quite a pretty sight. There’s a large ferris wheel in the background and various rides closer to the shopping center. Managed to find a nice handrail to take a couple of long exposures, took a while because the ferris wheel pattern changes and some of them are rather slow and boring.

Yokohama long exposure

Another shot, from a different angle, we were about to go but the lights became nice and pretty and I just had to snap another one.

Yokohama ferris wheel

By now were quite hungry and this buffet looked enticing. We were without western food for a while and there was some here at this “Premium Buffet”. Fancy name and plenty of plastic food, how can you go wrong?

Plastic food

Unfortunately a buffet will always be a buffet meaning the food there wasn’t anything flash, but for the price, we weren’t complaining. I had quite a few dishes and you can see what I filled myself up with.

Plate 1Plate 2Plate 3

For dessert Tang, decided to have a Masterchef-esque challenge to plate up some dessert as best you could. Here’s my attempt.

Dessert

There was a massive fondue there as well, something Kevin would probably drink out of.

Big fondue

Being Christmas, there’s plenty of decorations, lights and Christmas trees to go round. Unexpectedly out of nowhere, some music starts playing and the tree lights up and produces some cool lighting animations to go with the music.

Christmas tree light show

After the spectacle ended, we continued outside to explore Yokohama and see what it had to offer. First thing we saw was this funky ‘sculpture’ it sorta looked like a rollercoaster or a part of a pinball machine where the balls loop around.

Futuristic looking decor

Further down was a rather large crowd, wondering what it was, we found a street performer and he seemed to refer to himself as Johnny. He had a very compelling way of speaking and seemed to draw the crowd’s attention very well.

Johnny the street performer

He was amazing with them old diablo things (the string between the two sticks and that plastic/wooden cup thing which you spin inside). He got one going and flicked it in the air, ridiculously high. Would have taken a good 8 or so seconds for it to come back down. The awesome thing is, he catches it too! and it still spins.

Up highand caught

Another neat trick involved the use of a rubber glove, he places it over his head to his nose (but not covering his mouth) and manages to blow it up pretty big. No idea who that’s done without using the mouth.

Blowing a glove balloon over his head

I decided to move on from Johnny’s show and look around the place and came across this boat, very lovely looking thing with a nice white base and lovely wooden masts. From what I could find, looks like this was a training ship used primarily before WW2.

Nippon Maru Yokohama

A state of some lady figure was also around the boat, again with these sort of things, I don’t know anything about their significance.

Angelic statue of sorts

Moving past the dock there were some random statues, including one a smallish totem pole standing randomly in a poorly lit park. It’s here I really tested the limits of my D700 and this is as low light as it gets.

Totem statue

While at the harbour’s edge, another opportunity presented itself and the ferris wheel became almost like a piano! White on the outside with some black ‘keys’ in the middle.

Piano ferris

After this I met up with the rest of them and this is where I found out that Johnny, our street performer, did not speak a word of English. From the way he was speaking it sounded like he was definitely a foreigner and would seemingly mention bits of English (inc. his name) with his fluent Japanese. Bizzare. Moving on, there were more uber low light shots, looking up I saw an interesting mix of colours from the leaves above, quite strange how some of the leaves are perfectly green while others are yellow and about to fall off.

Green and gold leaves

The last spectacle of our night was this lovely building, so much detail in its design and it was just amazing to look at. Not sure what it’s fore but simply everything about it was just gorgeous, very elegant.

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ntranced represents a 27 year old's life, his experiences and his passion.
At the moment that represents electronic music, automotive, travel, food and photography.

You'll find random recipes as I attempt to be a master chef, photos of where I've been and events I've shot. Progress of my car as I make it my own, adventures and mischief away from home and favourite tunes and upcoming/past events.